The singer and multi-instrumentalist Bishi began her musical career on more than one traditional path.

Born Bishnu Priya, she trained as a pianist, and by the time she was a teenager, she had considered a career in classical music. At the same time, growing up in London as the child of Indian immigrants, she also pursued Hindustani music.

Her vocabulary expanded further when she taught herself to play bass listening to the Pixies and began exploring styles from punk to traditional English folk music and gypsy tunes to contemporary composers Meredith Monk and Arvo Pärt.

"I knew being a straight classical musician was far too constricting for me," she says. "It was going to be a mix of lots of other things.

"I said, ‘I need to go out there, meet lots of people and experiment with different idioms.’ "

A blend of plenty of musical languages and different tongues will be present in her show "Albion Voice," at the Kitchen in New York on Friday. Inspired by the 2012 album of the same name, the performance features her singing in English, Bengali, Bulgarian and biblical Greek, and deals with the quest for personal and national identity. The transformations that have taken place in her home country serve as a starting point.

The recording opens with an outdoor soundscape of birdsong and clanging bells moving into a nasal chant as Bishi speaks words from "The Canterbury Tales." In the title track, her light, girlish voice wraps lithely around Irish-sounding folk melodies with ornamental turns that mix with a sitar twang and swelling strings. "I am Indian skin and Albion voice," she sings.

An early sacred choral music style morphs into Eastern-sounding melismas, vocal slides, electronic effects and clusters of close harmonies in "Dia Tia Maria."

"Britain as a nation itself has always changed and been revolutionized by its immigrants," she says. "I’m very much within that lineage."

As the artist has done to cultivate her particular musical voice and persona, the event will draw together varied influences. The project sprung in part from Bishi reading the words of Chaucer and observing how diverse dialects and cultures folded into the "mongrel tongue" of English. The work also uses words by Milton and Mary Elizabeth Frye and is directed by her regular collaborator Matthew Hardern.

Bishi says it deals with relations between India and England and with the multicultural, creative place where she grew up. She feels that place is now fading as London becomes — like New York — a "rich man’s playground."

"It’s been a melting pot" of cultural input, Bishi says.

In terms of performance style, that also includes Laurie Anderson and Grace Jones and the idea of "if Liz Taylor met Liz Fraser in space."